Friday, 31 May 2013

The Group Project - A much needed update

Heya everyone :D It's been a few days of working solidly, since I last updated, so here's the rundown of what's been going on c:
Yesterday, as a group we had to present the group project we've been working on for the last two months, I think we presented pretty well and we were able to finish the film on time, which is always a massive plus! c:

For anyone interested, below is our final group film c: I was going to spend time blogging more about the production stages of the film, like I have been doing, but due to deadlines and being short on time, I haven't yet. I'll talk about my role in the film, later in this blog post and update you guys on our production logging, as a lot has changed since the last time I talked to you guys about it o:

I'm actually really pleased with the outcome of the final film and I think everyone in our group worked really hard to achieve it :D My main role in this project was as a 2D animator, working on the interview scenes c: As seen in my 'An insight into the group project' post, we had a production log. Since then, we have had many discussions and feedback sessions and a lot has changed. Our final production log is below.

With many of the original scenes deleted and a lot of re-organisation in terms of animators. Katie and Beverly switched with me, to work on the chibi style of the flashback scene together, whilst I was put to work, exclusively on the interview scene. Below is the work I produced for this project, that made it into the final cut. I really enjoyed this task as it was very far out of my comfort zone, working with human animation isn't something I'm used to doing, and I really enjoyed working on it :D

Our reasons for cutting so many scenes that were previously present in our animatic, was mostly due to feedback from our lecturers. We regularly had meetings with Kathy, so she got to know our project quite well, then occasionally we'd have the odd meeting with Ann to discuss where we were going with the project, theory wise and to work on our presentation skills. When the project was still in its animatic stages, we were able to get some helpful feedback off Derek, who really liked our animatic and gave us several pointers in ways to improve it. However, the final decision for changing our work was after a screening with Andy. He mentioned that our scenes seemed to be quite fast paced compared to the audio clip we were working from, which gave way to a much slower mood. He said it'd be good for us to cut out some of these more 'busy' shots and focus more on extending just a few of them, to better fit in time with the audio. We all agreed with this and decided to lengthen what was previously the 'surfers' scene and the 'wave claw' scene into a longer sequence, keeping it all as one shot. I felt this fit the audio much better than what we previously had and I'm glad we had that session with Andy and were able to make those adjustments.

We decided to go for a non-serious, slapstick-like approach to our project, taking inspiration from things like Charlie Chaplin, Chuck Jones’s animations, Ren and Stimpy, Felix the Cat and a variety of other places. This was quite a risky thing to have done, considering how serious our audio clip with, I spent quite a lot of time researching genre conventions of slapstick comedy and we all made sure that in the ‘flashback’ scenes, the animation was loose and the expressions were exaggerated, to achieve this effect. I was a little worried about how well we’d make this work, but overall, I think it worked really well, and coupled with Georgi’s music, giving it serious undertones, I think it makes quite an atmospheric, whilst still fun, scene.

Overall, I really, really enjoyed working on the group project, I think we all worked well as a team and it helped us get a better feel of what it'd be like, in industry, to have different roles and go from a starting idea to a finished product c: